AMT Theater

The brilliant librettist Howard Ashman laid the groundwork for the renaissance of musical theater in recent decades. But after when he wrote Little Shop of Horrors with Alan Menken, and before he reunited with Menken to bring Disney musicals back to life with The Little Mermaid, he made his Broadway debut with a flop: Smile his 1986 collaboration with composer Marvin Hamlisch (A Chorus Line), which ran for fewer than 50 performances and left no cast album behind for its trouble. The J2 Spotlight Musical Theater Company—which, like Encores! and Musicals in Mufti, specializes in brief revivals of underexposed musicals of yore—christens its fifth season by revisiting this cult musical comedy about tensions, pressions and friendships at a California beauty contest (adapted from the 1975 film). Sophie Stromberg and Bridget Delaney play the two contestants we get to know best, and Lauren Weinberg and Christopher Deprophetis play the frazzled couple running the show. Company cofounder Robert W. Schneider directs.   

The J2 Spotlight Musical Theater Company, which stages short runs of underexposed musicals from Broadway's past, continues its fifth season with this bouzouki-heavy 1968 musical adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis's novel (and Michael Cacoyannis's film) about a bookish young man who befriends an earthy Greek peasant. Book writer Joseph Stein was coming off Fiddler on the Roof when he created this show with composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb, who were coming off Cabaret; though not by any metric as successful as those shows, Zorba had a respectable nine-month run, was revived in 1983 and contributed one song—the declaratory "Life Is"—to the standard repertoire of older nightclub singers. J2 cofounder Robert W. Schneider directs a cast led by Jeremy Radin, Quinn Corcoran, Catherine LeFrere, Katie Claire McGrath and Elora Von Rosch.